Last night I watched the pilot of Fringe, Fox's attempt at a portentous new X Files.  This was the second broadcast of it so they called it a Special Premiere Encore.  Mostly it's a perfectly bogus piece of Homeland Security apologetics and beneath reproach, but there was this one thing.

After the prefatory horror the first real scene was the guy and the skinny blonde in bed.  They talk like a Serious Couple so we're meant to take this seriously -- only this is far too early in a television plot (especially a two-hour one) to introduce a real romance, so something's wrong.  But they're both in the FBI, so this must be love.  Then other things happen and ancillary antagonisms are introduced for a while (exactly on schedule for a television plot).  Eventually the guy and the blonde are in the place looking for the thing, but first they talk about they love each other, and this is hard for her because of issues but he really means it and she beams at him adoringly and they love each other.  They really mean it.  Then the thing explodes and infects him with the infectious agent.  We're about half an hour into it now.

The next hour is all taken up with overcoming the difficulties to find the clues to let the mad scientist invent the antidote to stop the guy from dissolving like everyone else did in the prefatory horror part, if only they can discover the clues in time.  And she loves him, so she works extra hard at this, even though they introduce the other guy who is clearly going to be the show's real love interest.  And during this phase they inject enough confused nonsense to make it equally plausible by the rules of the formula that they might either save the guy so she can love him or they might not so she can be brokenhearted and scarred instead.

So I considered the two possibilities, and having endured all this Friday The Thirteenth The Series-level hokum I decided I would be equally displeased whether the guy lived or died.  So they made the antidote and he lived, and she loved him, and I was displeased.  But then as soon as he was recovered enough to stand the guy showed that although he probably really did love the blonde as he said, he was actually not a good guy at all, but a bad guy, so they had a car chase and he wrecked from which he died, and she was brokenhearted and scarred instead.  So I was doubly displeased, plus a bonus for their having it both ways.

And then just before the credits they wheeled his corpse into the lab at the Secret Corporation, and made it clear that they were going to make him live AGAIN.  Instead.  Bullshit.  This is what I'm talking about.  When you make everything happen, nothing has happened.

Two other points of note.  First, whenever a scene starts in a new locale, the caption that says "Boston, Massachusetts" is not a caption; instead it's huge metallic 3D-block letters posed in the scene, like a roadblock or a sign.  Looks like crap, plus a terrible idea.  When we helicopter in over "Baghdad, Iraq" the big fat emblem is laid out over the city, crushing it -- and then we have a ground-level shot up to our helicopter... flying past the underside of the giant B.  What fresh moron thought of that?

Second, and worst of all, when the guy and the blonde start searching the place for the thing he pulls out his bolt cutter and right away starts opening up people's storage units at random, without warrant or apparent plan.  "What are you doing?" says the blonde.  "I'm a federal agent," replies the guy.

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